Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric inspired supporters, enraged foes

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By Helen Coster and Maria Tsvetkova

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Moments before he was killed at a Utah university Wednesday, Charlie Kirk was taking a question about transgender people and mass shootings. 

“Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” the event attendee asked. 

“Too many,” Kirk replied. 

Data shows trans people conduct a very small percentage of mass shootings, according to the fact-checking website PolitiFact. But the reply was vintage stuff for the conservative activist and provocateur who became a MAGA celebrity over the past decade and is credited with inspiring a generation of college students to become politically active and turn out for President Donald Trump. 

In debates across the country, on college campuses, podcasts and on X, Kirk seemed to relish confrontation, casting himself as a champion of free speech and the open exchange of ideas.

“Charlie believed in the power of argument and good-faith debate to find the truth and guide people towards, if not agreement, then at least mutual understanding,” said a statement posted on the website of his activist organization Turning Point USA. The organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kirk’s rhetoric, which often involved anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant comments, engendered strong feelings. 

While many of his views on trans rights and LGBTQ rights, abortion, immigration, affirmative action and gun control reflected today’s mainstream Republican Party, others were more aligned with the party’s far-right faction, such as blaming Black people for crime and claiming the left is using Islam to destroy America.

He occasionally struck conciliatory notes, telling conservative media figure Tucker Carlson in a July interview: “How do we actually de-radicalize the country in the next couple of years? That’s my obsession.” 

“Charlie Kirk was adored by folks who shared his vision of America, in which white people were very victimized by efforts to create more diversity and equity. He was despised, feared by folks who were targets of those views,” said Kyle Spencer, who documented the rise of Kirk’s movement in her book “Raising Them Right.”

“So there were two worlds.”

The day pop star Taylor Swift announced her engagement to NFL player Travis Kelce, Kirk told the 14-time Grammy winner whose recent tour grossed over $2 billion, “you’re not in charge,” urging her to “reject feminism” and “submit to your husband.”

Asked in 2024 if he had a 10-year-old daughter who had been raped, would he have wanted her to carry the baby to term, he said, “The answer is yes, the baby would be delivered.”

HISTORY OF ANTI-BLACK, ANTI-IMMIGRANT REMARKS

Kirk dismissed affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion programs and people he perceived as having benefited from them. He called the country’s passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “a huge mistake.” 

On a July 2023 episode of his show, he said TV personality Joy Reid, former First Lady Michelle Obama, the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did not have the intelligence to achieve what they did without affirmative action. “You had to go steal a white person’s slot to be taken somewhat seriously,” he said.

Kirk also espoused the tenets of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory – which fosters the belief that non-white immigrants will replace white citizens – and claimed Islam is “not compatible with Western civilization.” 

Following Wednesday’s shooting, organizations representing minority groups condemned Kirk’s murder and other recent examples of political violence and did not blame the tragedy on any kind of expression of his views.

“Today’s fatal attack on Charlie Kirk is a horrific and appalling marker of escalating violence in the public sphere,” the NAACP Legal Defense Fund said in a statement Wednesday, condemning Kirk’s killing “and political violence in the strongest possible terms.”

RALLIED ANTI-LGBTQ SENTIMENT

Kirk opposed transgender rights and his organization sponsored rallies against transgender medical care. In April 2024, he likened doctors who perform gender-affirming care to Nazis committing atrocities. 

“One issue I think that is so against our senses, so against the natural law and dare I say a throbbing middle finger to God, is the transgender thing happening in America right now,” he said during a speech posted in 2023 by Right Wing Watch.

In the same speech, he cited a Bible verse saying that a woman who puts on men’s clothes or a man who puts on a woman’s garment is an “abomination.” 

During his show in April 2022, he argued that gay couples “are not happy just having marriage. Instead, they now want to corrupt your children.” 

In a statement Thursday, a spokesperson for GLAAD, one of the country’s leading LGBTQ advocacy groups, condemned political violence as unacceptable and gun violence as an “epidemic” that needs urgent action. 

“It is also a demonstrable fact that Charlie Kirk spread infinite amounts of disinformation about LGBTQ people,“ the spokesperson said. “Lies and vitriol about transgender people were a frequent part of his rhetoric and events.”

METEORIC RISE IN MAGA MOVEMENT

The son of a counselor at a mental health clinic and an architect, Kirk grew up in an affluent neighborhood outside Chicago. He launched his student movement, the non-profit organization Turning Point USA, when he was 18. 

He started working for Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr. and was introduced to Trump at his private club Mar-a-Lago in 2017.

After January 6, 2021, when many Republicans thought Trump’s political career was over, Kirk embraced the Stop the Steal movement claiming the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats, and was later credited with turning out the campus vote for Trump in 2024.

Today, Turning Point USA says it has chapters in 3,500 high schools and college campuses, 250,000 students as members, and an annual budget of around $80 million.

Its website hosts a “Professor Watchlist” tool that allows students to report teachers and leadership for having “radical left” views.

Stacey Patton, a Black professor at Morgan State University, a historically Black university, described what it was like to be added to the list. ”For weeks my inbox and voicemail were deluged. Mostly white men spat venom through the phone,” using racial slurs and obscenities, she wrote in her blog on Substack on Thursday. “They threatened all manners of violence.”

(Reporting by Helen Coster and Maria Tsvetkova in New York. Editing by Michael Learmonth and Suzanne Goldenberg)